Sarah's own eyes turned cold, her hopeless mouth became grim. "I leave you to your fool's devices," said she, and vanished.
Edmond thought silently of her warning of Paul. After a moment he rose, a little more weakly now, and proceeded again to his laboratory. He lifted a revolver from the table drawer, fitted thereto a silencer. Was it the same calibre as Paul's? What matter, since there would be no inquest? Then he deliberately fired the weapon into a towel bundled in the corner; thereafter he removed the silencer and dropped the gun into his pocket. The towel and the bullet it contained he tossed into the jar of nitric acid, where it too disintegrated under the evil brown fumes. Edmond returned to his chair before the fire; he watched the low dying flames and occupied his minds with strange thoughts. He waited.
Then came the sound of a key in the lock—Paul's key, given long ago, he knew, by Vanny. He smiled at the grim irony of the thing, for it amused him to perceive with what bitter humor his god Chance worked his will—that Vanny who loved him should give to Paul who hated him the means of his destruction. And now there moved a shadow in the hall.
Through the library door came Paul, a bleak and desolate figure with staring eyes. He moved into the dim fire-glow; there was a blue glint along the barrel of a revolver he held. He stood before Edmond, and the superman himself, accustomed as he had become to living in a white glare of hatred, was startled by the hate in Paul's eyes.
"I am going to kill you," said Paul in a strained and husky voice as he raised his weapon. Edmond stared at him with cold inhuman eyes, through which for a moment looked both minds. The superman was probably the belligerent opposing mind, building up mastery, like a man staring down a wild beast. "Lion tamer," jeered a part of his brain.
"I am going to kill you," croaked Paul, and his eyes shifted. He could not look at the emaciated white demon before him, whose eyes now flamed with a fierce intentness. Paul's face was pale and moist with the dread that once again he was about to be defeated. "Where's Vanny?" he muttered. Edmond's thin smile twisted his lips; his opponent's wavering had given him victory, and he held Paul's will.
"She waits for you at your apartment," he replied.
"That's a lie, you sneering devil!"
"I have never lied, finding no need," said Edmond quietly. His lethargy was returning as the drug's power waned, and he felt weakness growing within him. He probed the tortured eyes into which he gazed.
"This hysterical fool will drop his gun and run from the scene of his crime," he reflected, "in the best tradition of the stage and the mystery novel. Two weapons here would be highly undesirable." He thrust his glance more fiercely into Paul's eyes.
"Listen to me, Paul. When you leave here, drop your gun into your pocket. Drop your gun into your pocket, and return at once to Vanny. Say nothing to her; I seal your lips upon this night forever."
Edmond read assent in the mad eyes he faced. Paul's gyrating brain might never recall the words, but somewhere in his subconscious the command was registered, imperative and compelling.
Edmond drew that which he had prepared from his pocket, clasping his incredible fingers tightly about it. He held his helpless opponent a moment longer in his fiery gaze.
"For what evil I have done you, I render now full recompense," he said, and dropped his eyes.
Silence.
Edmond raised his eyes, and saw Paul's pallid face with sickness and indecision written there, and he saw the weapon wavering and irresolute. He noted too that a familiar misty glory danced behind Paul, and that Homo's expression seemed almost one of welcome. "So at my nadir as at the zenith I still follow my fancy," he mused and smiled his old ironic smile. A command flamed in his eyes; and Paul's hand steadied, as a rush of rage overpowered him. Still smiling, Edmond dropped his eyes again, and the gun crashed.
It was not until he saw the morning papers that Paul realized that Edmond had held in his hand a revolver with one empty cartridge.
THE PLANET OF DOUBT
HAMILTON HAMMOND STARTED nervously as the voice of Cullen, the expedition's chemist, sounded from his station aft. "I see something!" he called.
Ham bent over the floor port, staring into the eternal green-gray fog that blankets Uranus. He glanced hastily at the dial of the electric plumb; fifty-five feet, it said with an air of positiveness, but that was a lie, for it had registered that same figure for a hundred and sixty miles of creeping descent. The fog itself reflected the beam.
The barometer showed 86.2 cm. That too was an unreliable guide, but better than the plumb, for the intrepid Young, four decades earlier in 2060, had noted an atmospheric pressure of 86 in his romantic dash from Titan to the cloudy planet's southern pole. But the Gaea was dropping now at the opposite pole, forty-five thousand miles from Young's landing, and no one knew what vast hollows or peaks might render his figures utterly useless.
"I see nothing," Ham muttered.
"Nor I," said Patricia Hammond, his wife—or more officially, biologist of the Smithsonian's Gaea expedition. "Or—yes! Something moved!" She peered closer. "Up! Up!" she screamed. "Put up!”
Harbord was a good astrogator. He asked no questions, nor even took his glance from his controls. He simply slapped the throttle; the underjets roared in crescendo, and the upward thrust pressed all of them hard against the floor.
Barely in time. A vast gray wave of water rushed smoothly below the port, so close that its crest was carved by the blast, and spray clouded the glass.
"Whew!" whistled Ham. "That was close. Too close. If we'd touched that it would have cracked our jets for sure. They're white-hot."
"Ocean!" said Patricia disgustedly. "Young reported land."
"Yeah, forty-five thousand miles away. For all we know this sea is broader than the whole surface of the Earth."
She considered this, frowning. "Do you suppose," she asked, "that this fog goes right down to the surface everywhere?"
"Young says so."
"But on Venus the clouds form only at the junction of the upper winds and the underwind."
"Yes, but Venus is closer to the Sun. The heat here is evenly distributed, because the Sun accounts for practically none of it. Most of the surface heat seeps through from within, as it does on Saturn and Jupiter, only since Uranus is smaller, it's also cooler. It's cool enough to have a solid crust instead of being molten like the larger planets, but it's considerably colder than the Venusian twilight zone."
"But," she objected, "Titan is as cold as a dozen Nova Zemblas, yet it's one perpetual hurricane."
He grinned. "Trying to trip me? It isn't absolute temperature that causes wind—it's differences in temperature between one place and another. Titan has one side warmed by Saturn, but here the warmth is even or practically even, all around the planet, since it conies from within."
He glanced suddenly at Harbord. "What are we waiting for?" he asked.
"For you," grunted the astrogator. "You're in command now. I command until we sight the surface, and we've just done that."
"By golly, that's right!" exclaimed Ham in a satisfied voice. On his last expedition, that to the night side of Venus, he had been technically under Patricia's orders, and the reversal pleased him. "And now," he said severely, "if the biologist will kindly step aside—"
Patricia sniffed. "So you can pilot us, I suppose. I'll bet you haven't a single idea."
"But I have." He turned to Harbord. "Southeast," he ordered, and the afterjets added their voices to the roar of the others. "Put up to thirty thousand meters," he continued, "we might mn into mountains."
The Gaea, named for the ancient goddess of Earth, who was wife to the god Uranus, plunged through the infinity of mist away from the planet's pole. In one respect that pole is unique among the Sun's family, for Uranus revolves, not like Jupiter or Saturn or Mars or the Earth, in the manner of a spinning top, but more with the motion of a rolling ball. Its poles are in the plane of its orbit, so that at one point its southern pole faces the Sun, while forty-two years later, halfway around the
vast orbit, the opposite pole is Sunward.
Four decades earlier Young had touched at the southern pole; it would be another forty years before that pole again saw noon.
"The trouble with women," grumbled Harbord, "is that they ask too many questions."
Patricia spun on him. "Schopenhauer!" she hissed. "You ought to be grateful that Patrick Burlingame's daughter is lending her aid to a Yankee expedition!"
"Yeah? Why Schopenhauer?"
"He was a woman-hater, wasn't he? Like you!"
"Then he was a greater philosopher than I thought," grunted Harbord.
"Anyway," she retorted acidly, "a couple of million dollars is a lot of money to pay for a square mile of foggy desert. You won't hog this planet the way you tried to hog Venus."
She was referring, of course, to the Council of Berne's decision of 2059, that the simple fact of an explorer's landing on a planet did not give his nation possession of the entire planet, but only of the portion actually explored. On fog-wrapped Uranus that portion would be small indeed.
"Never mind," put in Ham. "No other nation will argue if America claims the whole fog-ball, because no other nation has a base near enough to get here."
That was true. By virtue of its possession of Saturn's only habitable moon, Titan, the United States was the only nation that could send an exploratory rocket to Uranus. A direct flight from the Earth is out of the question, since the nearest approach to the two planets is 1,700,000,000 miles. The flight is made in two jumps; first to Titan, then to Uranus.
But this condition limits the frequency of the visits enormously, for though Saturn and Earth are in conjunction at intervals of a little over a year, Uranus and Saturn are in conjunction only once in about forty years. Only at these times is it possible to reach the vast, mysterious, fog-shrouded planet.
So inconceivably remote is Uranus that the distance to its neighbor, Saturn, is actually greater than the total distance from Saturn to Jupiter, from Jupiter to the asteroids, from these to Mars, and from Mars to the Earth. It is a wild, alien, mystery-cloaked planet with only icy Neptune and Pluto between it and the interstellar void.
Patricia whirled on Ham. "You!" she snapped. "Southeast, eh! Why southeast? Just a guess, isn't it? Truthfully, isn't it?"
"Nope," he grinned. "I have my reasons. I'm trying to save whatever time I can, because our stay here is limited if we don't want to be marooned for forty years until the next conjunction."
"But why southeast?"
"I'll tell you. Did you ever look at a globe of the Earth, Pat? Then maybe you've noticed that all continents, all large islands, and all important peninsulas are narrowed to points toward the south. In other words, the northern hemisphere is more favorable for land formation, and as a matter of fact, by far the greater part of the Earth's land is north of the equator.
"The Arctic Ocean is nearly surrounded by a ring of land, but the Antarctic's wide open. And that same thing is true of Mars, assuming that the dark, swampy plains are old ocean beds, and also true of the frozen oceans on the night side of Venus.
"So I assume that if all planets had a common origin, and all of them solidified under the same conditions, Uranus must have the same sort of land distribution. What Young found was the land that corresponds to our Antarctica; what I'm looking for is the land that ought to surround this north polar sea."
"Ought to, but maybe doesn't," retorted Pat. "Anyway why southeast instead of due south?"
"Because that direction describes a spiral and lessens the chance of our striking some strait or channel between lands. With a visibility of about fifty feet, it wouldn't take a very wide channel to make us think we were over ocean.
"Even your English Thames would look like the Pacific in this sort of fog, if we happened to come down more than half a hundred feet from either bank."
"And I suppose your American Mississippi would look like Noah's flood," said the girl, and fell to gazing at the gray waste of fog that swirled endlessly past the ports.
Somewhat less than an hour later the Gaea was again descending gingerly and hesitatingly. At 85 cm. of air pressure Ham had the rocket slowed almost to a complete stop, and thereafter it dropped on the cushioning blast of the underjets at a speed of inches per minute.
When the barometer read 85.8 cm., Cullen's voice sounded from the stern, where the port was less obscured by the jets themselves. "Something below!" he called.
There was something. The fog seemed definitely darker, and features or markings of some sort were visible. As the ship settled slowly, Ham watched intently, and at last snapped out the order to land. The Gaea dropped, with a faint jar, to a resting place on a bare, gray graveled plain domed with a hemisphere of mist that shut off vision as definitely as a wall.
There was something wild and alien about the limited scene before them. As the blast died, all of them stared silently into the leaden-hued vapors and Cullen came wordlessly in to join them. In the sudden silence that followed the cutting of the blast, the utter strangeness of the world outside was thrust upon them.
Venus, where Pat had been born, was a queer enough world with its narrow habitable twilight zone, its life-teeming Hotlands, and its mysterious dark side, but it was twin sister to the Earth.
Mars, the desert planet with its great decadent civilization, was yet stranger, but not utterly alien. Out on the moons of Jupiter were outlandish creatures of bizarre little worlds, and on cold Titan, that circled Saturn, were fantastic beings born to that wild and frigid satellite.
But Uranus was a major planet, no more than half-brother to the little inner worlds, and less than cousin to the tiny satellites. It was mysterious, unrelated, alien; no one had ever set foot on a major planet save the daring Young and his men forty years before.
He had explored, out of all the millions of square miles of surface, just one square kilometer forty-five thousand miles away from where they stood. All the rest was mystery, and the thought was enough to subdue even the irrepressible Patricia.
But not for long. "Well," she observed finally, "it looks just like London to me. Same sort of weather we had last time we were there. I think I'll step outside and look for Piccadilly."
"You won't go out yet," snapped Ham. "I want an atmospheric test first."
"For what? Young and his men breathed this air. I suppose you're going to say that that was forty-five thousand miles away, but even a biologist knows that the law of diffusion of gases would keep a planet from having one sort of air at one pole and another at the opposite. If the air was safe there, it is here."
"Yeah?" asked Ham. "Diffusion's all right; but did it ever occur to you that this fog-ball gets most of its heat from inside? That means high volcanic activity, and it might mean an eruption of poisonous gases somewhere near here. I'm having Cullen make a test.”
Patricia subsided, watching the silent and efficient Cullen as he drew a sample of Uranian air into an ampule. After a moment she flexed her knees and asked, "Why is the gravitation so weak here? Uranus is fifty-four times as large as the Earth and fifteen times as massive, yet I don't feel any heavier here than at home." Home to Pat, of course, was the little frontier town of Venoble, in the Venusian Cool Country.
"That's the answer," said Ham. "Fifty-four times the size of the Earth or Venus, but only fifteen times as heavy. That means its density is much smaller—to be exact .27. Figures out to about nine-tenths the surface gravitation of the Earth, but it feels to me almost equal. We'll check a kilogram weight on the spring balance after a while and get an accurate figure on its
"Safe to breathe?"
"Perfectly. Argon's an inert gas, and a substance can't possibly be poisonous unless it can react chemically in the body."
Pat sniffed. "See? It was safe all the time. I'm going outside."
"You'll wait for me," he growled. "Every time I've indulged that reckless disposition of yours you've got into trouble." He checked the thermometer beyond the port, nine degrees centigrade—the temperature of late autumn b
ack home. "There's the cause of this perpetual fog," he observed. "The surface is always warmer than the air."
Pat was already pulling a jacket over her shoulders. Ham followed suit, and fell to twisting the handle of the air lock. There was a subdued hissing as the slightly denser Uranian air forced its way in, and he turned to speak to Harbord, who was lighting a pipe with great satisfaction—an indulgence strictly forbidden in space, but harmless now that an air supply was assured.
"Keep an eye on us, will you?" Ham said. "Watch us through the port, just in case something happens and we need help."
"We?" grunted Harbord. "Your wife's out of sight already."
With a muttered imprecation, Ham spun around. It was true. The outer door of the air lock was open, and a lazy wisp of fog drifted in, scarcely moving in the utterly stagnant Uranian air.
"The crazy little— Here! Give me that!" He seized a belt with twin holsters, holding a standard automatic as well as a terribly destructive flame pistol. He whipped it around him, seized another bundle, and plunged into the eternal mists of Uranus.
It was exactly as if he stood under an inverted bowl of dull silver. A weird, greenish, half twilight filtered down, but his whole world consisted of the metal ship at his back and a fifty-foot semicircle before him. And Pat—Pat was nowhere visible.
He shouted her name. "Pat!" The sound muffled by the cold dampness of the fog sounded queerly soft to his ears. He bellowed again at the top of his voice, and then swore violently from sheer relief as a thin, hushed reply drifted back out of the grayness.
In a moment she appeared, swinging a zigzag, ropy, greenish-gray organism.
"Look!" she called triumphantly. "Here's the first specimen of Uranian plant life. Loosely organized, reproduces by partition, and—what the devil is the matter?"
"Matter! Don't you know you might have been lost? How did you expect to get back here?"
"Compass," she retorted coolly.
"How do you know it works? We may be right on the magnetic pole, if Uranus has one."
The Lost Master - The Collected Works Page 129
